Being ridiculous doesn't make your dislike of the argument sound wise... quite the opposite.
Despite your sarcasm, the case against direct democracy does not imply that anyone thinks constitutional amendments should require only a simple majority from the legislature.
You're successfully arguing against something no one proposes.
I'm ridiculing the authors' motivated reasoning. Their actual belief is that only the anointed should make decisions, and hoi polloi allowed no voice, and they are prepared to cherry pick evidence to make whatever argument they need to make in specific cases. I'm actually not unsympathetic to this view, but we might disagree on who the anointed ought to be.
The hoi polloi should be the pool from which the representatives are selected. But after that, the representatives should be making the decisions, except for something foundational like a referendum on whether we remain or leave a federation. See my post below.
If you had true democracy in the candidate selection process - such as selection via US style primaries open to all - maybe there would be less need for direct democracy initiatives. Secret choices by oligarchs - family connections etc such as is the case now with suppression of any candidates who refuse to kowtow to the establishment - make a mockery of the pretense that elected provincial or federal representatives and be extension appointed civil servants represent the people and honor their wishes.
The article is a defense of the top down we-know-better that the great unwashed system of government in Canada. As someone said a few years ago, a slave that gets to choose its master every four years is still a slave. As the song goes “Meet the new boss - same as the old boss”.
I finally found your response below. Some good points.
I believe that gaining a large part of your knowledge by discussion with your colleagues is a recipe for disaster and/or stagnation . When your colleagues are all selected by a small elite group of oligarchs as is the case in Canada the odds of progressing or achieving breakthroughs are drastically reduced. The quote about the “broader public good” is fine except who defines what that is. In an oligarchy I would submit that the broader public good gets defined as that which enriches and maintains the power of those who selected them via the closed loop major party candidate selection process.
Everyone brings their own knowledge to the table, but when the topic is outside their own field of expertise, they're going to need to gain knowledge from elsewhere, presumably from experts, and there is still the matter of deliberating to decide which experts are to be believed. That's how democracy is supposed to work. The issue is how to choose the representatives who do the deliberating and make the decisions.
Arguing against direct democracy and using 'monetary policy' and 'cybersecurity regulation' as examples for why it's too complex for dumb citizens to understand is more straw-man than argument. The logic could easily be extended to general election campaigns. How can an individual citizen possibly be capable of weighing all the intricate problems a government will face over the course of its term? Silly people. Go home, play Xbox, and let the grown-ups make decisions for you.
It seems entirely appropriate to utilize direct democracy to seek a mandate on specific questions, like "should Canada change its voting system" or "should Alberta remain in Canada". Yeah, they're divisive - so are governments. Democracy has flaws. We deal with them because allowing/facilitating democratic anger is better than pretending it doesn't exist.
It's also breathtakingly ignorant of the elitism that typified 2000s politics that, simplistically, led to today's populism. Reacting to today's anger-populism characterized by backlash to elites by essentially arguing that average people should play a smaller role in government and decision-making and elites should be MORE isolated is... interesting? Foolish is a better word.
Also: "should adopt stricter rules for who should be allowed to run for leader as well as rules for who should be allowed to select and remove that leader. Delegated conventions provide a greater opportunity to vet those in the room, as well as those at the front of the room" -- who's adjudicating those rules? Who's vetting those in the room? What's your criteria? Education? Ideology?
Would you be comfortable giving Danielle Smith that kind of power and authority? Or is your plan to just ensure someone like her never makes it that far? Certainly worked out well in the past, history is filled with examples of successful, insular, undemocratic institutions having long-term success and stability and never leading to massive, revolutionary breakdowns.
There is a third way that incorporates the elements of what you're looking for (average guy input) without losing the benefits of representative democracy as described by the author. See my post above.
I think this misses the mark, somewhat. In general, I oppose direct democracy because I think it yields inferior policy results to representative democracy.
When it comes to changes to the fundamental governance structures of a society, however, the case changes. In that situation, the members of a polity should be allowed a greater degree of direct control. On the other hand, if we're throwing representative democracy out for a question, we shouldn't assume that the rules around elections for representative democracy continue to apply unchanged.
For example, direct democracy seems to require specific proposals. A referendum on the Charlestown Accord for example is a concrete proposal that voters can give a Yes/No answer to. In the context of an independence referendum, I don't think it makes sense to treat it as meaningful unless it is a direct Yes/No on the fully spelled out proposal - after negotiating the legal text of required legislation and agreements with Canada, aboriginal groups, and anyone else with whom negotiations are necessary. A vote to separate is meaningless when separated from a concrete, specific proposal to separate. If it's a general mandate to do something, and the elected officials will be tasked with filling in the details, the usual representative democracy process is fine.
So for example, the Parti Quebecois could hold an independence referendum after negotiating a separation from Canada, to determine whether there was genuine public support for the separation, but one held before negotiations should be considered purely advisory. It's forcing voters to select yes/no, with no clarity about what either answer means, and where a supermajority of voters would ultimately say 'it depends' - they're just not given that opportunity. The ambiguity inherent in that approach means that by definition the result doesn't have democratic legitimacy for anything in particular. We shouldn't pretend that it does.
A few observations. I think the elephant in the room is Quebec. As in, Alberta wants what Quebec has.
Democracy, it is an imprecise tool. This is clearly an example of what I mean.
The authors are arguing for changes that should have happened loooooooooong ago. It's why we are here where we are today in this divided confederation. The authors should offer a mea culpa: 'You are right. These long standing issues should have been taken care of.' An aopology couldn't hurt. Carney's predecessor loved apologizing, Why weren't these long-standing structural issues successfully dealt with through ordinary representative politics before now?
The authors are defending the status quo while ignoring why, what, 20-30% of Albertans are so sick of how the province has been treated they want to leave Canada.
That is not a small number. This is not going away. The petition will not lead to an end to how those people feel. A lot of Albertans have a separation sized knot on there collective faces. These frustrations have been growing for decades. If politicians had listened earlier, the public wouldn't be demanding direct votes, petitions, and recalls today. People haven't suddenly fallen in love with direct democracy—they just believe the current system won't fix their problems unless it is forced to.
They will lose the vote but they will not be going away and I suspect the next attempt will be far better organized, communicated and led.
The authors should be asked: why propose these things now? For 20-30% of the population it is too little too late.
Alberta Conservative politics started going wonky with the first 3 way leadership runoff in 2005. Now the party is dominated by angry anti-vaxxers who have become angry separatists. The UCP is breaking up and the NDP will win the next election.
In pushing for representative democracy, please use your platform to push proportional representation.
With proportional representation separatists in Alberta would be sectioned into their own rump party and held to real scrutiny in a legislature not beholding to them.
Not as a generalization, but the problem is when you have "those people" who clearly aren't representative of the population having the leverage to influence government.
The best way the ensure that a body is representative is to select it by random selection according to the principles of basic statistics. See my post above.
I agree with pretty much everything stated here. Certainly this referendum is NOT a form of direct democracy, it is manufactured consent. These questions have not come from the people but from the small cabal in the Premier’s office led by Rob Anderson. Albertans not paying attention will be hoodwinked. Unfortunately, resentfully, we have to play along otherwise the real danger exists that these outrageous queries will pass. One thing I disagree with Mr.Wesley about is a form of proportional representation is really what we need. In former correspondence Mr. Wesley points to the rise of the radial right in European democracies where PR has given them a foothold in the power structure. But the other side of that is continued disenfranchisement of people like me who never feel represented. I think these extreme parties rise to prominence due to low voter turnout out of complacency. A good solution to that is mandatory voting like in Australia. Whatever the solution, clearly direct democracy is not it. Too easy to manipulate, to easy to lose the benefit of deliberation and compromise when complex issues get reduced to a binary choice. Democracy is slow and plodding and that’s a feature, not a bug.
Completely disagree, what harm has actually been caused? None. If anything I would argue it has helped push changes. Would we have gotten as much education funding (still not enough) had the strike (form of direct democracy) and several recalls being pushed not happen. Would the federal liberals who are still predominantly Trudeau caucus be going this hard into resources and O&G without a looming separation vote.
If anything I would push for more direct democracy. If people had the ability to vote on bills how many dumbass bills could have been stopped? Alberta’s carbon tax that was never ran on during the election.
As for the UCP dumbass immigration questions, I agree it’s a waste of money on rules they already can do. Plus they are short sighted, majority of temporary workers work on farms doing jobs that Canadians do not want to do for minimum wage. So the least society can do is give them education and healthcare. If they remove that, cost of living will go up either by higher wages, farms closing because they either can’t find people or loose money paying higher wages which will shrink the volume of food produce etc.
While I get the arguments Jared and Ken are making about this specific Alberta referendum, I disagree with their wider point that direct democracy in Alberta and Canada are a failure.
Direct democracy actually has a history in Alberta. There used to be an understanding of the distinction between a plebiscite (which is a non-binding citizen direct vote, the results of which allows a sitting government to gauge citizen opinion on a topic) and a referendum (which until recently was a binding citizen direct vote on a subject that obligated a sitting government to act on the results). Today, for some reason, we have this strange concept of a 'non-binding referendum' which should more correctly be termed a plebiscite.
I completely agree that the current practice of the sitting government cooking up the wording of the questions, whether they be citizen-originated or from the government itself, has been a disaster - hopelessly politicizing specific yet complex issues with questions that lean the voter to the preferred outcome of the government in power.
I also agree that the bar should be high for a citizen-initiated direct democracy questions. I disagree that citizens should not have the ability to initiate a question. Yes, the required signatures should be a high number, and the question citizens are seeking to have answered should pass legal muster before it is put to a provincial vote, but the process should still exist.
I am less enthused about continuing the current practice of questions cooked up by the government themselves. The current glob of loaded questions is adequately covered by the article, and I largely concur with Ken and Jared's analysis.
The 2026 loaded questions, however, have a fairly recent precedent in this UCP government chicanery in so-called direct democracy. The 2021 referendum on permanent DST is a great example of a government loading their question to favour their preferred outcome. The vote yielded an extremely narrow 'no' to year-round DST, disappointing the UCP (and those that wanted year-round DST to happen). Voters opposed to full-time DST had only one option, and that was the status quo of continuing the twice yearly time change, because the *actual preferred option* of 'no' voters was to do away with DST altogether, and return us to the pre-1971 practice of full time Mountain Standard Time. This option, of course, was quite intentionally not included in the 2021 referendum question.
The government's response to the 2021 DST vote has been to ram through permanent DST without the messiness of creating a new referendum question. This top-down government-knows-best approach would appear to be Jared and Ken's preferred option; I personally would have appreciated a referendum question that provided three options: permanent DST, permanent MST, or no change. It will remain to be seen if, as other jurisdictions historically have learned, that full time DST is not the great thing it was thought to be (look it up, it's interesting).
To wrap this comment up - I think there is still a place for direct democracy in Alberta, but the process needs a complete rethink. It should be an all-party committee that reviews any question, and this committee should not be weighted in favour of the sitting government. The review committee should also have independent legal analysis, and of course indigenous review where appropriate constitutionally. There should be a clear distinction (and perhaps public and MLA education) on the difference between a plebiscite (non-binding) and a referendum (binding). It can work, as it has worked elsewhere in the world; we just need to adopt better practices.
"Modern government also requires expertise and informed deliberation. It is simply not possible for a single individual, never mind every voter, to know the intricacies of subjects like cybersecurity regulation and monetary policy, let alone the interaction between these things. We need those same legislators, bureaucrats and semi-governmental bodies to dedicate their careers to not just understanding the nuances of complex issues, but also deciding which issues need attention right now."
This column and more is exactly what a lot of people need to read.
Representative democracy means representatives doing what the people would do if they had sufficient information, time, ability and inclination to do so. And a major part of finding out what that should be is discussing and deliberating with their colleagues.
"They aren’t just delegates of their base; they are trustees of the broader public good."
Exactly! Edmund Burke wrote in 1774: "Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion."
"... if you’re trying to build a credible political party."
The thing is, such a thing doesn't seem to be possible. How many years and elections have to pass before we stop the insanity of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting better results?
The real change that is needed is to replace elections with using a lottery to decide who gets to represent us. Because voting doesn’t make a democracy - representation does! And if you want a statistically representative sample of a population, you take a random sample of a sufficient size to satisfy a desired confidence level and margin of error. This is basic statistics. And getting a representative sample is the whole point of elections, right?
This is the concrete solution to the problem of party politics and the beauty pageant elections that sustains it.
The problem is that these "popular assemblies" exist in a cocoon of permanent civil servants who select "experts" to "help" the representatives in their "deliberation". Control of the information feed to representatives leads to control of the output. GIGO
An overdue article in the midst of a chaotic time with an excellent explanation of what this referendum is and what it isn't. I would add 2 things. Our legislature meets 34 days this year . There is very little debate , orders in council are how we are being ruled by non- elected officials. There is a move to replace the importance of elected MLAs by the "direct" democracy . The cost is outrageous with a missing component - the province is spending 4 million to plead their case whereas there are no matching funds to support the NO side - just private funds.
Correct. It would have made far more sense for the first PQ government in Quebec to be able to secede from Canada without a referendum.
Being ridiculous doesn't make your dislike of the argument sound wise... quite the opposite.
Despite your sarcasm, the case against direct democracy does not imply that anyone thinks constitutional amendments should require only a simple majority from the legislature.
You're successfully arguing against something no one proposes.
I'm ridiculing the authors' motivated reasoning. Their actual belief is that only the anointed should make decisions, and hoi polloi allowed no voice, and they are prepared to cherry pick evidence to make whatever argument they need to make in specific cases. I'm actually not unsympathetic to this view, but we might disagree on who the anointed ought to be.
The hoi polloi should be the pool from which the representatives are selected. But after that, the representatives should be making the decisions, except for something foundational like a referendum on whether we remain or leave a federation. See my post below.
👏👏👏
I see what you did there!
If you had true democracy in the candidate selection process - such as selection via US style primaries open to all - maybe there would be less need for direct democracy initiatives. Secret choices by oligarchs - family connections etc such as is the case now with suppression of any candidates who refuse to kowtow to the establishment - make a mockery of the pretense that elected provincial or federal representatives and be extension appointed civil servants represent the people and honor their wishes.
The article is a defense of the top down we-know-better that the great unwashed system of government in Canada. As someone said a few years ago, a slave that gets to choose its master every four years is still a slave. As the song goes “Meet the new boss - same as the old boss”.
Representation doesn't have to be that way. See my response above.
I finally found your response below. Some good points.
I believe that gaining a large part of your knowledge by discussion with your colleagues is a recipe for disaster and/or stagnation . When your colleagues are all selected by a small elite group of oligarchs as is the case in Canada the odds of progressing or achieving breakthroughs are drastically reduced. The quote about the “broader public good” is fine except who defines what that is. In an oligarchy I would submit that the broader public good gets defined as that which enriches and maintains the power of those who selected them via the closed loop major party candidate selection process.
Everyone brings their own knowledge to the table, but when the topic is outside their own field of expertise, they're going to need to gain knowledge from elsewhere, presumably from experts, and there is still the matter of deliberating to decide which experts are to be believed. That's how democracy is supposed to work. The issue is how to choose the representatives who do the deliberating and make the decisions.
This is a little asinine.
Arguing against direct democracy and using 'monetary policy' and 'cybersecurity regulation' as examples for why it's too complex for dumb citizens to understand is more straw-man than argument. The logic could easily be extended to general election campaigns. How can an individual citizen possibly be capable of weighing all the intricate problems a government will face over the course of its term? Silly people. Go home, play Xbox, and let the grown-ups make decisions for you.
It seems entirely appropriate to utilize direct democracy to seek a mandate on specific questions, like "should Canada change its voting system" or "should Alberta remain in Canada". Yeah, they're divisive - so are governments. Democracy has flaws. We deal with them because allowing/facilitating democratic anger is better than pretending it doesn't exist.
It's also breathtakingly ignorant of the elitism that typified 2000s politics that, simplistically, led to today's populism. Reacting to today's anger-populism characterized by backlash to elites by essentially arguing that average people should play a smaller role in government and decision-making and elites should be MORE isolated is... interesting? Foolish is a better word.
Also: "should adopt stricter rules for who should be allowed to run for leader as well as rules for who should be allowed to select and remove that leader. Delegated conventions provide a greater opportunity to vet those in the room, as well as those at the front of the room" -- who's adjudicating those rules? Who's vetting those in the room? What's your criteria? Education? Ideology?
Would you be comfortable giving Danielle Smith that kind of power and authority? Or is your plan to just ensure someone like her never makes it that far? Certainly worked out well in the past, history is filled with examples of successful, insular, undemocratic institutions having long-term success and stability and never leading to massive, revolutionary breakdowns.
Good work guys!
There is a third way that incorporates the elements of what you're looking for (average guy input) without losing the benefits of representative democracy as described by the author. See my post above.
I think this misses the mark, somewhat. In general, I oppose direct democracy because I think it yields inferior policy results to representative democracy.
When it comes to changes to the fundamental governance structures of a society, however, the case changes. In that situation, the members of a polity should be allowed a greater degree of direct control. On the other hand, if we're throwing representative democracy out for a question, we shouldn't assume that the rules around elections for representative democracy continue to apply unchanged.
For example, direct democracy seems to require specific proposals. A referendum on the Charlestown Accord for example is a concrete proposal that voters can give a Yes/No answer to. In the context of an independence referendum, I don't think it makes sense to treat it as meaningful unless it is a direct Yes/No on the fully spelled out proposal - after negotiating the legal text of required legislation and agreements with Canada, aboriginal groups, and anyone else with whom negotiations are necessary. A vote to separate is meaningless when separated from a concrete, specific proposal to separate. If it's a general mandate to do something, and the elected officials will be tasked with filling in the details, the usual representative democracy process is fine.
So for example, the Parti Quebecois could hold an independence referendum after negotiating a separation from Canada, to determine whether there was genuine public support for the separation, but one held before negotiations should be considered purely advisory. It's forcing voters to select yes/no, with no clarity about what either answer means, and where a supermajority of voters would ultimately say 'it depends' - they're just not given that opportunity. The ambiguity inherent in that approach means that by definition the result doesn't have democratic legitimacy for anything in particular. We shouldn't pretend that it does.
A few observations. I think the elephant in the room is Quebec. As in, Alberta wants what Quebec has.
Democracy, it is an imprecise tool. This is clearly an example of what I mean.
The authors are arguing for changes that should have happened loooooooooong ago. It's why we are here where we are today in this divided confederation. The authors should offer a mea culpa: 'You are right. These long standing issues should have been taken care of.' An aopology couldn't hurt. Carney's predecessor loved apologizing, Why weren't these long-standing structural issues successfully dealt with through ordinary representative politics before now?
The authors are defending the status quo while ignoring why, what, 20-30% of Albertans are so sick of how the province has been treated they want to leave Canada.
That is not a small number. This is not going away. The petition will not lead to an end to how those people feel. A lot of Albertans have a separation sized knot on there collective faces. These frustrations have been growing for decades. If politicians had listened earlier, the public wouldn't be demanding direct votes, petitions, and recalls today. People haven't suddenly fallen in love with direct democracy—they just believe the current system won't fix their problems unless it is forced to.
They will lose the vote but they will not be going away and I suspect the next attempt will be far better organized, communicated and led.
The authors should be asked: why propose these things now? For 20-30% of the population it is too little too late.
Alberta Conservative politics started going wonky with the first 3 way leadership runoff in 2005. Now the party is dominated by angry anti-vaxxers who have become angry separatists. The UCP is breaking up and the NDP will win the next election.
In pushing for representative democracy, please use your platform to push proportional representation.
With proportional representation separatists in Alberta would be sectioned into their own rump party and held to real scrutiny in a legislature not beholding to them.
Picking your electoral system based on "I want those people silenced and this will shut them up" isn't a good sign.
Not as a generalization, but the problem is when you have "those people" who clearly aren't representative of the population having the leverage to influence government.
The best way the ensure that a body is representative is to select it by random selection according to the principles of basic statistics. See my post above.
If Pierre Poilivere beings demanding electoral reform he will save his leadership and most likely, the party.
I agree with pretty much everything stated here. Certainly this referendum is NOT a form of direct democracy, it is manufactured consent. These questions have not come from the people but from the small cabal in the Premier’s office led by Rob Anderson. Albertans not paying attention will be hoodwinked. Unfortunately, resentfully, we have to play along otherwise the real danger exists that these outrageous queries will pass. One thing I disagree with Mr.Wesley about is a form of proportional representation is really what we need. In former correspondence Mr. Wesley points to the rise of the radial right in European democracies where PR has given them a foothold in the power structure. But the other side of that is continued disenfranchisement of people like me who never feel represented. I think these extreme parties rise to prominence due to low voter turnout out of complacency. A good solution to that is mandatory voting like in Australia. Whatever the solution, clearly direct democracy is not it. Too easy to manipulate, to easy to lose the benefit of deliberation and compromise when complex issues get reduced to a binary choice. Democracy is slow and plodding and that’s a feature, not a bug.
Another very viable option
A better solution that any kind of electoral solution is random selection. See my post above.
Completely disagree, what harm has actually been caused? None. If anything I would argue it has helped push changes. Would we have gotten as much education funding (still not enough) had the strike (form of direct democracy) and several recalls being pushed not happen. Would the federal liberals who are still predominantly Trudeau caucus be going this hard into resources and O&G without a looming separation vote.
If anything I would push for more direct democracy. If people had the ability to vote on bills how many dumbass bills could have been stopped? Alberta’s carbon tax that was never ran on during the election.
As for the UCP dumbass immigration questions, I agree it’s a waste of money on rules they already can do. Plus they are short sighted, majority of temporary workers work on farms doing jobs that Canadians do not want to do for minimum wage. So the least society can do is give them education and healthcare. If they remove that, cost of living will go up either by higher wages, farms closing because they either can’t find people or loose money paying higher wages which will shrink the volume of food produce etc.
While I get the arguments Jared and Ken are making about this specific Alberta referendum, I disagree with their wider point that direct democracy in Alberta and Canada are a failure.
Direct democracy actually has a history in Alberta. There used to be an understanding of the distinction between a plebiscite (which is a non-binding citizen direct vote, the results of which allows a sitting government to gauge citizen opinion on a topic) and a referendum (which until recently was a binding citizen direct vote on a subject that obligated a sitting government to act on the results). Today, for some reason, we have this strange concept of a 'non-binding referendum' which should more correctly be termed a plebiscite.
I completely agree that the current practice of the sitting government cooking up the wording of the questions, whether they be citizen-originated or from the government itself, has been a disaster - hopelessly politicizing specific yet complex issues with questions that lean the voter to the preferred outcome of the government in power.
I also agree that the bar should be high for a citizen-initiated direct democracy questions. I disagree that citizens should not have the ability to initiate a question. Yes, the required signatures should be a high number, and the question citizens are seeking to have answered should pass legal muster before it is put to a provincial vote, but the process should still exist.
I am less enthused about continuing the current practice of questions cooked up by the government themselves. The current glob of loaded questions is adequately covered by the article, and I largely concur with Ken and Jared's analysis.
The 2026 loaded questions, however, have a fairly recent precedent in this UCP government chicanery in so-called direct democracy. The 2021 referendum on permanent DST is a great example of a government loading their question to favour their preferred outcome. The vote yielded an extremely narrow 'no' to year-round DST, disappointing the UCP (and those that wanted year-round DST to happen). Voters opposed to full-time DST had only one option, and that was the status quo of continuing the twice yearly time change, because the *actual preferred option* of 'no' voters was to do away with DST altogether, and return us to the pre-1971 practice of full time Mountain Standard Time. This option, of course, was quite intentionally not included in the 2021 referendum question.
The government's response to the 2021 DST vote has been to ram through permanent DST without the messiness of creating a new referendum question. This top-down government-knows-best approach would appear to be Jared and Ken's preferred option; I personally would have appreciated a referendum question that provided three options: permanent DST, permanent MST, or no change. It will remain to be seen if, as other jurisdictions historically have learned, that full time DST is not the great thing it was thought to be (look it up, it's interesting).
To wrap this comment up - I think there is still a place for direct democracy in Alberta, but the process needs a complete rethink. It should be an all-party committee that reviews any question, and this committee should not be weighted in favour of the sitting government. The review committee should also have independent legal analysis, and of course indigenous review where appropriate constitutionally. There should be a clear distinction (and perhaps public and MLA education) on the difference between a plebiscite (non-binding) and a referendum (binding). It can work, as it has worked elsewhere in the world; we just need to adopt better practices.
"Modern government also requires expertise and informed deliberation. It is simply not possible for a single individual, never mind every voter, to know the intricacies of subjects like cybersecurity regulation and monetary policy, let alone the interaction between these things. We need those same legislators, bureaucrats and semi-governmental bodies to dedicate their careers to not just understanding the nuances of complex issues, but also deciding which issues need attention right now."
This column and more is exactly what a lot of people need to read.
Representative democracy means representatives doing what the people would do if they had sufficient information, time, ability and inclination to do so. And a major part of finding out what that should be is discussing and deliberating with their colleagues.
"They aren’t just delegates of their base; they are trustees of the broader public good."
Exactly! Edmund Burke wrote in 1774: "Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion."
"... if you’re trying to build a credible political party."
The thing is, such a thing doesn't seem to be possible. How many years and elections have to pass before we stop the insanity of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting better results?
The real change that is needed is to replace elections with using a lottery to decide who gets to represent us. Because voting doesn’t make a democracy - representation does! And if you want a statistically representative sample of a population, you take a random sample of a sufficient size to satisfy a desired confidence level and margin of error. This is basic statistics. And getting a representative sample is the whole point of elections, right?
This is the concrete solution to the problem of party politics and the beauty pageant elections that sustains it.
The problem is that these "popular assemblies" exist in a cocoon of permanent civil servants who select "experts" to "help" the representatives in their "deliberation". Control of the information feed to representatives leads to control of the output. GIGO
Clearly a working popular assembly should be free to choose whomever it wants to assist in their information gathering.
An overdue article in the midst of a chaotic time with an excellent explanation of what this referendum is and what it isn't. I would add 2 things. Our legislature meets 34 days this year . There is very little debate , orders in council are how we are being ruled by non- elected officials. There is a move to replace the importance of elected MLAs by the "direct" democracy . The cost is outrageous with a missing component - the province is spending 4 million to plead their case whereas there are no matching funds to support the NO side - just private funds.